We still have a problem figuring out who the victims are at Penn State. Who to blame and who to absolve. And we still have a problem figuring out exactly where football belongs.

That remains obvious the more we obsess over Joe Paterno’s win total, the players left behind at a detonated program and the future recruits they won’t get, and the “zero” win totals of 14 years’ worth of Penn State players.

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The NCAA is almost never right. Its very existence is wrong, and chances still are good that it won’t keep being right from now on. But how much more proof do we need that the descriptions of the “culture gone awry,” of “sports themselves (becoming) too big to fail or even challenge," and of “the value of hero worship and winning at all costs” are all spot-on?

Kill the messenger if you want, or at least doubt it, but don’t doubt the message.

Speaking of killing the messenger, it’s time to start pointing the finger at the real perpetrators of the past, present and future wreckage of the Penn State program. Not at the NCAA for erasing all those Paterno wins, denying future prospects scholarships and making the lives of current players so chaotic.

Point it at Paterno, Jerry Sandusky, Graham Spanier, Tim Curley, Gary Schultz, and everybody who helped enable the enablers—all the people who didn’t care about the enormous consequences of their actions.

In the positions of authority they held and willingly accepted, they were obligated to protect the rights of all the students. They chose to protect themselves instead, and couldn’t have cared less about the damage their actions would do to current students and future generations.

Smart as they were, they had to have known that getting caught would bring swift and severe punishment, including from the NCAA, on unwitting parties who had no choice but to trust them. They knew that, and didn’t care.

They put those students at risk. The NCAA just happened to be the risk they ignored. The NCAA also happens to be an easy, convenient target. As selfish as Spanier and Co. are, maybe they banked on that—that if they got busted and young lives were disrupted, they still wouldn’t take as much heat as the familiar, bureaucratic ol’ boogeyman.

It’s the American sports fans’ default position.

It’s also the default position to wring our hands over the “innocent” players caught up in something they didn’t know about or that happened before they arrived.

No question, they are sympathetic. Once again, they got used by the system that’s designed to take more from them than it gives. Spanier and the rest—Paterno most of all, obviously—are beyond the NCAA’s reach. The brunt of the sanctions fall on them. Colleague Mike DeCourcy couldn’t be more right in pointing out that it’s one of the NCAA’s poorest, least-sensible weapons.

But it also is a reminder that, regardless of what shenanigans go on off the field to prop up the cash machine that is football, the game still is made up of humans. Thus, to deflate the bloated importance of football, humans end up taking the brunt of it.

That’s not the real problem here. In this context—that of children abused by the monster roaming the football facility for so long and by the grown-ups who gave him safe harbor—labeling those players and the ones who won’t land at Penn State in the next few years as “victims” is downright obscene.

They’re unfortunate collateral damage, yes. Disproportionately harmed, true. Calling them “innocent” isn’t even out of line. But a football scholarship to a major revenue-producing program is still, until further notice, a privilege, not a right.

No matter how hard they worked and followed the rules and earned the opportunity, not a single one of them is entitled to a spot on Penn State’s roster, or anyone else’s.

To believe that—whether as a college player, high school prospect, fan or observer—is to buy into the very mindset that the NCAA’s edict proposes to erase. Excessive entitlement is what got Penn State, and all of college football, into this crisis in the first place.

In the big picture, those players now fall into the same campus-wide group of students with great talent, high motivation, tremendous work ethic, promises from their school and, still, big obstacles to getting where they need to go.

Except that, with that sports-first culture still entrenched, there still are plenty of people eager to smooth a path for them, more so than they would for the average student. Yet the whole idea is to bring football back in balance with the rest of college life.

So either the rest of the students will have to start getting the same attention, favors—and, yes, sympathy—as displaced and deprived football players, or football players are going to have to apply those skills and handle that adversity like the rest of the student body.

Yet, with all that, better to indulge their needs than the needs of a couple of other groups trying to snatch the “victim” label for themselves. The Paterno family barely deserves the space it takes to type their names. With every statement they issue and every public remark they make, they tell the world that to them, it always will be all about JoePa, and they apparently have no intention of halting the daily insult to the real victims Paterno hurt.

As for his former players ... just stop. It’s not about you, either. “I have no career wins! It’s so unfair!” so many have bleated since Monday’s announcement. For all the lessons they supposedly learned under the umbrella of the “Grand Experiment," their words tell us that they never learned anything resembling perspective.

Then again, consider their teacher.

That win total is yet another symbol of the over-emphasis on football—that out-of-balance culture—that had to go down, like the statue.

The more everybody focuses on win totals, legacies, bowl bans and scholarship reductions, the more that culture stays entrenched.

And the more the anger about those caught in the crossfire is aimed at the NCAA, the more Sandusky and the rest are rewarded for an insensitivity and carelessness that’s almost unspeakable.